Things that have happened
Sunday, August 13, 2006
I am afraid of this being the year that disappeared. 2006 will be the first of many vanishing years, perhaps. Old people are always saying that time speeds by faster and faster. I am only 23, and already things that seem like yesterday are turning out to be last year, or even the year before that. It doesn’t help that I haven’t kept up my journal.
Why is that? I’m not entirely sure. In my early years of online-journalling (this was in the pre-blog days), this was something that sometimes happened: Suddenly, I was possessed to take down my site, leaving nothing but a splash page saying something about a “hiatus” and a link to email me (back then, people actually did). The typical length of such a hiatus was about six months, and I’d emerge on the other end of it with a new domain name (or at least a new design - Version 2.0 or somesuch) and what I thought to be a completely different persona.
Maybe I stopped writing here because I needed to grow a new ego. Or maybe it’s a combination of more mundane factors, like that I’ve been crazy-insane-busy. Back in February I was taking classes on frontal lobe functions and modern Indian history, editing the first story I’ve published in a national magazine (it came out in May, under a pseudonym), “finishing” my first scientific article (since then it’s been submitted, rejected, rewritten, resubmitted, lather, rinse, repeat), and sleeping with my best friend, among other things. The City was beginning to open up for me in big ways, and I was seeing a lot of dance and theatre for the first time. I also tend to get kindof SAD-ish in February, though this year it hit hardest in March.
I stopped sleeping with my friend and fell for a tall man with a Russian accent. I wrote manic emails like this:
I spent most of yesterday leading a gallery tour in Chelsea for the prospective graduate students, and then I went shopping in Soho and found this soft white dress that is so amazing and pretty that I spent $140 on it without even blinking, and this whole time it was freezing out and windy and I wasn’t dressed well enough. Buying the dress made me late for meeting the Russian boy at the bar in the IFC, so I called and was all apologizing and still wound up taking the wrong subway and having to walk a long way in the freezing cold and being even later, but I got there and he was all smiling at me and wanting to see the dress and hugging me and getting me some vodka to warm me up. And then we saw Manderlay which is incredibly intense and terrible and beautiful and we held hands the whole time and when it was over we were both just completely blown away and loved it and felt like the only people in the world who could see a completely disturbing film like that and come out of it excited and talking about how we’re going to make things like that someday. We went to the Belgian beer bar on West 4th and I impressed him with my knowing which beers were the best and we sat in a corner and had this whole conversation about world politics, and, still beaming about the movie, he kept touching my hair and we’d kiss and my hair would get in our mouths but it wasn’t even weird and he’s this amazing kisser. We wanted to go somewhere not so loud but we both live far away from there and it was so cold so I said, “We could go to my lab. It’s a few blocks away” and he said “Really? Okay. Let’s go.” So we stopped and got more beer to smuggle in and I took him to the Psychology building and up to the lab and he was asking all about my job and I swear to God I did not think we were going to have sex… Then we got dressed and were drinking beer and eating my Valentine’s Godiva my mom had sent which was still in the lab and a grad student I knew walked in but I just gave her some chocolate and it was fine. We talked and talked about my work and his work and I asked him why he’s not married and he told me about being engaged when he was about my age but it didn’t work out and they don’t talk anymore and if he’d married her he’d never be doing the things he is now…
And then he never called me again and I started reading The Rules and reciting them to all my friends on a regular basis. I made a proclamation — “No more telling them my whole traumatic life history. No more letting them read my writing. No more sex on the second date. Fuck being honest. I want to get married.” — and I then proceeded to stop dating altogether. I fought a war against bedbugs. My lab got a big grant from the NIH and I got a MacBook Pro. In March, I went to visit my parents, who had just moved to Louisville, Kentucky, and my mother and I had our first mint juleps and derby pie at The Brown. In April, I got my wisdom teeth pulled and discovered that The Double Life of Véronique is probably the best movie ever made. In May, I presented a poster at the Vision Sciences Society conference in Sarasota, saw my writing in Barnes and Noble, and had a birthday. At some point, I re-decided not to get a Ph.D. in neural science or psychology. In June, I landed a room in a West Village apartment owned by a 50-something Buddhist ex-dental hygeinist, but I didn’t move out of my old apartment in Astoria until July. I watched my ex-lover and his wife haul pieces of my antique bed down four flights of stairs and into a sudden rain-storm. I took a summer fiction workshop, and, reluctantly, wrote short stories. I decided I really want to get an MFA in writing. I dreamt that I took out my own heart and lungs and zipped them up in a transplant bag, but did not die. In August, my goldfish with no name died, almost exactly a year after I got it. I got a visa to Russia, where I will be giving a talk on my research in St. Petersburg next week. One Sunday, I wrote for 18 hours straight, and was incredibly happy. The next Saturday, I walked for miles and took hundreds of photographs. And then, I started to miss my website.